Julian cooks ribs on the grill for most holidays in the summer. Usually he smokes them and makes his North Carolina-style sauce to slather them at the end of cooking. (Note: His sauce is in the tomato-based Lexington style. East of Raleigh, the sauce is vinegar and cayenne pepper. I won’t discuss the mustard-based abomination folks in South Carolina torture their pork with.) He decided to try a different sauce for Labor Day: Red-eye barbecue sauce. The link in the previous sentence is very close to what he made.
An explainer: Traditional red-eye gravy consists of two ingredients, drippings from a slice of fried country ham and strong black coffee. According to Craig Claiborne’s Southern Cooking, the red eye is derived from a circle of reddish fat that forms on the surface of the gravy. My belief is that the originator was too hung over to know what they were doing when they poured coffee into the skillet. The barbecue sauce Julian made had coffee in it, along with more traditional tomato-based sauce ingredients. I’m not sure that Lexington Barbecue #1 or Stamey’s uses shallots in their sauce recipes, though.
The ribs came out fine. The sauce wasn’t particularly sweet and had the telltale bitterness from the coffee. The bitterness was less pronounced when we had leftovers the next day for lunch. Perhaps the sauce needed time to let the flavors meld better. Julian usually doesn’t like coffee in other dishes, and I rarely touch the stuff. We’re not sure we’ll make it again.
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